Hydrogen Cars

Wow, wasn’t the Hindenburg zeppelin disaster of 1937 related to hydrogen? Please some feedback and comments on the safety issues of hydrogen powered cars would be appreciated.

Are Hydrogen Cars the Answer? - detailed article with research references!

Sheryl Canter at the Environmental Defense Fund has put together a nicely researched and referenced article about hydrogen car technology. Here is a brief outline of what I find to be the interesting points in her article:

1. The cars themselves would not have any polluting emissions, but the production process for generating the hydrogen fuel is quite polluting.

2. Fuel storage is a major problem, as either a liquid or a gas.

3. Extremely expensive and not likely to be mainstream for 10 or more years.

4. Hydrogen fuel has serious safety issues, as it is highly flammable.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Program manages research and development efforts to help make cars and trucks more energy-efficient, while at the same time developing technologies that will help transition the United States to using vehicles that do not require petroleum fuels. The Vehicle Technologies Program conducts its work through a variety of activity areas.

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Due to its high gravimetric energy density and carbon-free nature, hydrogen has the potential to act as an energy carrier in a low [greenhouse gas]-emissions future. Despite these fundamental advantages over carbon-based carriers, hydrogen still must overcome several technological barriers before it can be widely adopted.

Large-scale production of hydrogen is neither efficient nor carbon-free at the present time. Transportation and storage of hydrogen is difficult because of its low volumetric energy density. And hydrogen may offer pathways to higher conversion efficiencies than are available to traditional fuels, although those pathways are not currently cost effective.

The Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford University (GCEP) is continuing to investigate the basic science and technology solutions to all three of hydrogen’s main challenges. In addition to the work that has been completed on monitoring of bio-hydrogen conversion processes (2006), micro- and nano-scale fuel cells (2006), climate effects of hydrogen (2007), cyanobacteria-based hydrogen production (2007), solid-state NMR studies of oxide ion conducting ceramics for enhanced fuel cell performance (2008), and modeling, simulation and characterization of atomic force microscopy measurements for ionic transport and impedance in PEM fuel cells (2008), there are two ongoing projects in the area of hydrogen.

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